Pages

Thursday, February 23, 2017

One of the things I didn’t see made at home was sweets.
Growing up in India, it was easy to step out to a halwai ki dukan (sweetmeat
shop) and choose whatever caught your fancy. My mom usually made a couple of
basics like halwa and kheer in her kitchen to mark a holiday, but we bought the
rest. As with everything else, it’s easier to shift the responsibility of not
being able to make desserts to my life as a child in India J.

It was hard to live without Indian sweets after moving to
USA. Throughout my first pregnancy, I craved for
boondi-ka-laddu and kaju-ki-katli.…..Things weren’t the same
15yrs ago – we had one small grocery store that sold Indian staples, and the
variety of frozen food that you see today was non-existent. Even if you did
drive 1-2h to the big grocery stores, things didn’t exactly taste like they
should have. Over years, the sweet taste buds kind of dampened, and I started forgetting things that I’d liked in India. And then, as my daughters
grew older and got to eat sweets that our friends brought back from
their trips to India, my forgotten love re-ignited. We started to ask visiting friends
and family to carry boxes of Indian sweets; just so the girls could enjoy
them.

Very recently have I started learning how to make a few of the common sweets at home. To many of you, these would appear trivial; for me anything that the girls decide to like, is a triumph!

Over time, I figured it was easier to to consider my dal as “lentil soup”when eating lunch with
colleagues in US. But, somewhere, at the back of my mind, a soup was a
starter- served at the beginning of a meal. The mere mention of soup takes me
back to my mom’s soups- restricted to
tomato soup; carrot & tomato soup or spinach-carrot-tomato soup; all spiced
with ginger, cumin and salt. She cooked her vegetables, pureed them and then
strained them before serving. We’d all get a small bowl of it about 30min
before dinner during winter. They were all clear liquids, meant to enhance appetite.Soup as main course; or a full mean was an alien concept.